Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hereditary’ on Netflix, Ari Aster’s Diabolical Psycho-Horror Debut, Featuring an Unforgettable Toni Colette Performance

This week on Tons O’ Occult Fun Theatre is Hereditary (now streaming on Netflix), the explosive 2018 breakthrough by impressively committed wacko auteur Ari Aster. To be blunt, this movie is f—ed up. Horror movies are almost never truly scary, but this is one fits the descriptor, and is arguably the modern-day The Exorcist. Never more effective – and that’s saying something – in the lead is Toni Collette, who was screwed out of an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a psychological baggage-laden mother and artist who ends up dabbling with the occult, which appears in front of her like a life preserver while she’s drowning in grief. I remember initially expecting the film to be just another teen-screemer, but I ended up being spot-welded to my seat while it flickered in front of me at the theater – and I’m happy to report that it not only holds up, but surpasses the experience in a second viewing. 

HEREDITARY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Annie (Collette) builds tiny dollhouse models, and what separates her from arts-and-crafts and defines her as a true artist is, she really seems to be working out her shit in these little dioramas. Her current piece reconstructs her mother in a hospice bed, which tells us something. She stands up at her mother’s funeral and gives an awkward eulogy, which tells us a little more. She gets home afterwards and isn’t quite sure if she feels sad or not, which tells us plenty. Her relationship with her mother was defined by long spans of estrangement. Annie’s husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) seems patient about this (but wasn’t as patient about other things, but we won’t get too deep into that yet). Their 16-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff) seems indifferent to the woman, but their 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) was “Grandma’s favorite.” Charlie may be the only one grieving the loss. Meanwhile, the camera takes a spin through Annie’s workshop and briefly settles on a diorama scene in which Annie breastfeeds her baby and Grandma reaches for the child with her own breast bared. Clearly, things went on between them.

Charlie, notably, is an artist too. Like creepy little kids in creepy little movies, her sketches and sculptures are off-putting if not downright disturbing, but also kind of good? The girl frequently clucks her tongue – it’s a tic, but also a motif. You might hear it later when you turn off the lights and go to bed. She’s the only kid in class who doesn’t flinch when a bird slams into the window, leaving a bloody smear on the glass; she’s also the only kid in class who sneaks out to cut off the bird’s head and put it in her pocket. Peter is a typical teenager who smokes dope and ogles the girl sitting in front of him, but don’t worry, he’s about to get far less typical. Annie somewhat begrudgingly plops herself in a support group because she’s been to such things before and they helped – students, you may want to underline this passage, because it’s what you call “foreshadowing” – and in this scene, a bunch of her stuff about her difficult relationship with her mother and father and brother’s mental illness all spills out.

Peter wants to go to a party because The Girl will be there, but as mothers are wont to do, Annie makes him take his socially maladroit sister with him. Fine. And it goes about as badly as it possibly could, resulting in what is almost certaintly the most horrifically shocking smash-cut in the past quarter-century of film. It’s the kind of thing nobody ever recovers from, and I’m not just talking about those of us watching the movie. Annie’s shattered and Peter’s permanently glazed over and looking like he should be skipping school to go to the mental hospital and Steve tries to hold it and them and everything together the best he can. I’m speaking vaguely now because even though this movie is seven years old I daren’t spoil this for anyone ever. Anyway, Annie ends up in the company of this sweet, sweet woman named Joanie (Ann Dowd), who she met at the support group. Annie unloads more baggage and in return, Joanie shows her how to light a candle and chant some incantations to conduct a seance. They even have a fun little encounter with Joanie’s late grandson. Neat! I’m sure it’s all just harmless fun. You can turn the TV off now. Nothing interesting will happen from here on out, promise.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Hereditary stands alongside David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and David Eggers’ The Witch to comprise the unholy triumvirate of neo-horror films that redefined the genre for a generation. No exaggeration. You could easily add Get Out to that list, but it’s a slightly different animal, a more, shall we say, conscious riff on contemporary scary stuff. Otherwise, Aster’s toying with a few key influences from the earlier spate of “elevated” horror, including The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and dare I say Zulawski’s Possession? I dare!

Performance Worth Watching: Collette digs deep for this one, peeling back layer after layer until all the raw crazy is exposed. The performance bumped her from what seemed to be a series of paycheck roles to career renaissance that includes memorable turns in Knives Out, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Nightmare Alley and Juror #2.

Memorable Dialogue: Steve fields a call from the cemetery: “What does that mean, ‘desecrated’?”

Sex and Skin: Full-frontal male and female, as unsexy as it gets, almost.

Our Take: Did… did Grandma belong to some Satanic crocheting club? NO SPOILERS but from the earliest scenes, it sure seems like it, and now that headless chicken’s coming home to roost for the rest of the fam. It seems as if Annie invited the forces in instead of exorcising them, and now errrrrybody losin’ it. Aster’s brand of slow-burn tension-building and rigidly controlled visual language is like Hitchcock-via-Fincher, and tonally, there’s just enough room for a few choice – very choice – nuggets of grim – very grim – comedy amidst all the gleefully torturous screw-tightening and a reasonably poignant depiction of extreme grief. 

Hereditary is dead-serious in its making, but beneath that is the niggling sense that Aster is a bit of a deviant trickster, tickled to be putting everyone through the ringer – us and, especially, Collette, who distorts her lovely face into the most searing portraits of a haunted soul. By the time the filmmaker opens his third-act bag of tricks, we’re in his thrall, disturbed and darkly enchanted, hanging on a ledge by a pinkie finger waiting for the next reveal. 

Aster’’s a smart enough storyteller to take the time to cultivate the domestic drama early on – can’t help but appreciate his riveting take on the classic Miserable Dinner Scene – spicing it with drips and drops of tantalizing occult teases, before going full-bore batshit in the second half. It’s a story of familial angst couched in trauma and resentment, extreme enough at its fringes that watching the characters stumble into an open door straight to hell isn’t at all a stretch. These are desperate people, and Aster strips their veneer right off. His screenplay is fully loaded and ready to leave us gutshot and cackling. Hereditary laid to waste every possession-seance exorcism haunted-house occult-witchcraft movie that dared follow it. The genre is dead. Gone. Kaput. RIP. That’s not true, but it damn well should be.

Our Call: Hereditary is insane without being absurd or campy, or calculated in its provocation. Is it a masterpiece? I think it is. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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